From owner-sgroup@hugin.uunet.ca Thu Feb 24 12:17:32 2000 Subject: Re: sgroup s-disk help To: sgroup@hugin.uunet.ca Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 12:01:10 -0500 From: nic@carrot.com.au (Nic Grant) to quote Carlos Ucar: => You guys may laugh at me for this, but I cannot get s-disk to work for me! => Once I have the sample in my PC and make a succesful (at least it seems) => transfer to floppy, my sampler won't recognize the disk. The readme file is => not very helpful, so I was wondering if a merciful soul among you could => explain to me how to use it. (At least I know that I'm supposed to use it => in DOS, so that's not the problem) => Thanks a lot, Hmm. As author of the 'not very helpful' readme, :-) I can add the following: SDISK This document consists of updated information on sdisk. It assumes the following: 1. You have successfully unzipped the sdisk.zip package 2. You have read the sdisk.doc file supplied with the sdisk zip file sdisk works with diskette images for the Roland series samplers. It takes a sampler diskette and saves the entire contents to a file for emailing or uploading. It does not interpret the actual data on the sampler diskete in any way. It also takes sampler diskette image (*.out or *.sdk) files created with sdisk (or smac for the Mac, which is NOT written by me) and writes them to a diskette which can be later used in a sampler. Roland and other sites make available diskette image files for sample sets and operating system updates. sdisk can be used to 'reconstitute' these files onto a diskette. sdisk cannot convert samples from a diskette to WAV or any such format. I am led to believe that there exists a utility called 'convert' which can do this, but have never tried this first hand. For the record, I have converted samples from my S750 to WAV, using SDS over MIDI and a commercial product called 'SampleVision' and then used GoldWave or Sound Forge to convert the SampleVision .SMP file to .WAV. I have had only marginal success going the other way with this method (loop points in the data file are not preserved and I got clicks and pops). As I have hardly any need to convert from my Roland to WAV I have not pursued this any further. Now, an examination of common problems (in order of frequency) USING SDISK UNDER WINDOWS 95 or WINDOWS NT Sadly, sdisk does NOT work well under win95 or win NT. This is because sdisk was written years before these two systems and because the necessary BIOS calls that sdisk makes to do its work are not honoured by the 95/NT system. You will need to boot with a version of DOS 6 or below in order to use sdisk. This is commonly done by booting from a bootable iskette with DOS 6 or below on it. The error messages that sdisk generates are varied when attempting to run under win95/NT and don't appear to make any sense. DISK SIZES sdisk sometimes generates the message 'Diskette too small/large for file' when you attempt to write a sample image file to a diskette. This is because the file you are trying to write to the diskette is indeed the wrong size for the diskette. A sample image diskette can be of one of two sizes only and each size requires a different diskette type (use DIR to see the size of the file): File Size Common File Type Diskette Needed ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 737280 S50/550/W30 images Double Sided/Double Density (DS/DD) OS Updates from Roland 1474560 S7XX sample images Double Sided/High Density (DS/HD) Make sure you use the correct diskette type for the file size listed. If the file size is not either of those shown above, then it may need to be uncompressed or it may not be complete. If the file you downloaded for use with sdisk has a .zip extension, you will need to use an unzip package (PKZIP, WinZIP) to uncompress the file before attempting to use it. PATHNAME BUG The first version of sdisk has a bug in it where if you specify too long a pathname for the sample image file it will generate spurious error messages and abort the read/write. The lastest version of sdisk is V1.1 which is available from http://www.carrot.com.au . I believe Roland is still shipping V1.0 which has this bug. If you're not using long pathnames you will probably never notice this bug. W30 I have had many reports that the W30 OS upgrades shipped by Roland from their site do not work once placed into the W30. I cannot confirm this as I do not have a W30 myself and I have never heard from anyone using a W30 who has reported problems to me whether they ever got it working or not. In short, I don't know, but either the W30 images at Roland are corrupt, or the W30 diskette format is not compatible with sdisk (ie. a proprietary diskette sectoring scheme only known to Roland) OK, common problems out of the way, here are step by step instructions for both reading and writing a diskete image. These steps assume: 1. In the case of writing a diskette image, the file size of the file to be written is as described above under 'DISK SIZES'. 2. You are using DOS and not win95/NT 3. Your 3.5" diskete drive is the A: drive I also recommend making a separate directory on your hard disk and storing sdisk.exe and any sample files you may wish to use in the one directory. I'm going to assume this is C:\SDISK but of course you can use any directory you like. I'm also assuming the current directory is set to this directory. Under DOS, the command 'CD \SDISK' would do that. WRITING A DISKETTE IMAGE You need to to follow the steps below to write a diskette image. Generally you want to write when you have downloaded or received a sample image file and wish to use it in your sampler, say an OS update or a sample set. For the sake of these instructions, let's assume the sample file is called SAMPLE.OUT and is in the same directory as sdisk. 1. Insert the correct size diskette in the diskette drive on the PC. 2. Change to the directory with sdisk.exe and sample.out 3. Run sdisk 4. Press the 'D' key to set the file details 5. Type 'SAMPLE.OUT' and press RETURN 6. Press the 'A' key (or if your 3.5" floppy is B:, press the 'B' key) 7. Press the 'W' key and the image file sample.out will be written onto the diskette 8. When finished, remove the diskette from the PC and put it in your sampler. If an OS disk, try to boot with it or if a sample disk, see if you can read it. If you can, then all is well. If not... READING A DISKETTE IMAGE You need to to follow the steps below to read a diskette image to a file. Generally you want to read when you wish to make a sample image file from a sampler diskette for sending to someone or maybe just as a backup on your PC. For the sake of these instructions, let's assume you have a diskette with some string samples that you want to send to a friend and will call the image file STRINGS.OUT 1. Insert the sampler diskette in the drive of the PC 2. Change to the directory with sdisk.exe and where the sample image file will be stored. 3. Run sdisk 4. Press the 'D' key to set the file details 5. Type 'STRINGS.OUT' and press RETURN 6. Press the 'A' key (or if your 3.5" floppy is B:, press the 'B' key) 7. Press the 'R' key and the image file strings.out will be written into the directory. 8. When finished, you can email this file or do whatever you like with it. In order to make the file into a sampler readable diskette you (or someone else) will need to take the file and use sdisk to write the file to a diskette, as described above. TROUBLESHOOTING Got this far, but still no luck? Well I suggest you try as a test taking a known good sampler diskette (works in the sampler fine) and try reading it to a file and then writing the file back to a different diskette. If the sampler doesn't recognise the copy (or the PC doesn't recognise the original) you may have drive alignment problems on either the PC or the sampler (most likely the sampler) and may need to get it serviced. If the test above did work, then maybe the files you are working with are corrupt, incomplete or downloaded without the 'BINARY' setting if they were FTP'ed from an Internet site. Regards, Nic. -- Nic Grant, Soft Audio, nic@cairead.com, +353 872 300 914 - Sent by the sgroup mailing list on lists.uunet.ca For subscription information, send mail to majordomo@lists.uunet.ca and see http://www.generalconcepts.com/sgroup/ for more information.